Everyone knows what machinima is, right? Could you do a similar thing with...wait for it..."textinima" (not the best word I know, does anyone hear 'text enema' when they read that?).

A mud textinima contest would be like a mud story/log contest, with the textinimist paying careful attention to all the features of the mud to create an exciting log, so muds with cool combat, crafting, and so on would have good entries.

I suppose you would have to allow emotes and say msgs, and in theory a player could edit these after the log was created, but that's really no different than editing a machinima movie after it's finished. Perhaps the contest would give bonus points based on the percentage of mud-created content. Entries would have to include a complete transcript of commands separate from the log, so judges could replay a log to verify its authenticity.

Does anyone forsee any pitfalls in setting up rules for something like this? I'm thinking of running such a contest with a Fall-ish deadline (seriously, this isn't a joke!)

Would this be more like a "fake" log (i.e. recreating existing media in MUD format, presenting a joke with or without metahumor, what-have-you), a kinda-sorta tech demo (here's an example of what our game can do!), or something entirely different? If it's the former, I've seen both good and bad attempts at it, although most tend to be fairly mediocre. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

'course, it could theoretically also just be a log beauty pageant. Which isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but sometimes can be torture to read if one isn't intimately familiar with the setting/characters.

I don't actually see how it could be restricted to ingame content, however.

Putting aside the fact that whoever's doing the log could write whatever they wished, what's to stop players from faking actions with emotes (i.e. acting out a long, drawn-out crouching tiger battle scene) or some weird immortal running around using rechoes to create an epic quest?

It is indeed a nice idea, but it would have to rely rather largely upon the honor system.

I think the best way to organise a contest would be to invite submissions of command/input logs, rather than output logs, and specify they must be useable on a publicly available codebase. That way the 'textinima' can be recreated and viewed by anyone who downloads the codebase.

I don't know if you would get many entries, but then again some people do seem to have way too much time on their hands.

I think the best way to organise a contest would be to invite submissions of command/input logs, rather than output logs, and specify they must be useable on a publicly available codebase. That way the 'textinima' can be recreated and viewed by anyone who downloads the codebase.

I don't know if you would get many entries, but then again some people do seem to have way too much time on their hands.

Problem is, a publicly available codebase means that all the entries will be very similar. Anything that would be considered cool is a nifty feature that the reader hasn't seen before, which would completely be defeated by using stock code .